Nice Racism’s central message is that it’s a necessity to stop white people from seeing themselves as distinct people. “Insisting that each white person is different from every other white person,” DiAngelo writes, “enables us to distance ourselves from the actions of other white people.” She doesn’t see, or maybe she does, where this logic leads. If you tell people to abandon their individual identities and think of themselves as a group, they sooner or later will start to behave as a group. Short of something like selling anthrax spores or encouraging people to explore sexual feelings toward nine year-olds, is there a worse idea than suggesting — demanding — that people get in touch with their white identity?
If DiAngelo’s insistence that “I don’t feel guilty about racism,” reveling in scenes of making people experience and re-experience racial discomfort, and weird puffery in introducing herself by saying things like, “I am Robin and I am white” feel familiar, it’s because she’s hitting all the themes favored by Klansmen and identitarian loons of yore. Read a book like David Duke’s My Awakening (if you can stand it, you can find excerpts here) and you’ll encounter the same types of passages present in Nice Racism.
When I first heard about the irresolvable blue dress versus brown dress dispute, I assumed it was an outlier. I didn't realize that it was the template for every social issue going forward.
We now have a world where many of us see decades of commendable racial progress based on MLK's urge that we treat each other based on content of character, not color of skin. On the other side are many other people who consider themselves to be "white" who claim to have experienced an epiphany over the past year. They see themselves as drenched in guilt because they have been blindly perpetuating the mentality of slave-holders. Is there any possible way to bridge this gap?
I believe that Thomas Chatterton Williams has nailed it: Speak only for yourself based only on your own life, your own choices and your own experience. If you've been a lifelong closet racist, such as Robin DiAngelo, then, yes, it's time to come clean. I suspect there are more than a few such people But don't pretend that you can speak for anyone else. Don't pretend that it has been impossible to treat everyone else as individuals.Don't pretend that it is a rare thing. Don't pretend that everyone else inevitably sees people as "colors" and treats them in stereotypical ways. If you recently had a revelation that you are a racist, go fix yourself and quit projecting your dysfunctional mindset onto everyone else. As part of your healing process, you might want to read Thomas Chatterton Williams' excellent book: Self-Portrait in Black and White: Family, Fatherhood, and Rethinking Race.
A professor at Duke has convinced his students to open up classroom discussions. The project could not happen in the absence of trust. An excerpt from the WSJ:
To get students to stop self-censoring, a few agreed-on classroom principles are necessary. On the first day, I tell students that no one will be canceled, meaning no social or professional penalties for students resulting from things they say inside the class. If you believe in policing your fellow students, I say, you’re in the wrong room. I insist that goodwill should always be assumed, and that all opinions can be voiced, provided they are offered in the spirit of humility and charity. I give students a chance to talk about the fact that they can no longer talk. I let them share their anxieties about being socially or professionally penalized for dissenting. What students discover is that they are not alone in their misgivings.
Having now run the experiment with 300 undergraduates, I no longer wonder what would happen if students felt safe enough to come out of their shells. They flourish. In one class, my students had a serious but respectful discussion of critical race theory. Some thought it harmfully implied that blacks can’t get ahead on their own. Others pushed back.
My students had an honest conversation about race, but only because they had earned each other’s trust by making themselves vulnerable. On a different day, they spoke up for all positions on abortion. When a liberal student mentioned this to a friend outside class, she was met with disbelief.
No one is opposing “ideas”, they are opposing the pedagogy which is founded in CRT that teaches white children to be ashamed of the color of their skin and black children to feel like they are powerless victims.
Here is yet more evidence that the two political parties have two separate sycophant news teams. They cover the dysfunctional children of former President Trump and President Biden in starkly different ways.
Do you remember how the left-leaning news media hid the Hunter Biden laptop discovery? And then Twitter blocked the account of the New York Post as the election drew near? As Glenn Greenwald stated, the story was newsworthy for the corruption angle.
"Pretending that the Biden laptop story was about sex or drugs is utterly deceitful. A person's addiction struggles [and] consensual adult sex is not news. The story was (and is) about financial corruption. And there's *zero* doubt the docs were authentic," Greenwald wrote on Twitter.
If this laptop and big paycheck (to a person lacking any credentials to merit that kind of pay) had been about any of Trump's degenerate children, the media would have been all over it. I thought about this disparity further while watching excerpts from Russell Brand's recent interview with Glenn Greenwald.
But now there is more about Hunter, yet you will not see any of this in the NYT/NPR/WaPo side of the media:
President Barack Obama's ethics chief on Monday slammed Hunter Biden's 'shameful and grifty' sale of his art pieces for up to $500,000 to anonymous buyers as part of an upcoming exhibition that has already sparked bribery and potential money laundering fears.
Walter Shaub, the former Office of Government Ethics director, also warned that it could be a way for 'influence seekers' or foreign governments to funnel money to the Biden family.
Shaub, who last week called out Biden administration officials for hiring a slew of family members to a variety of positions, has urged Hunter and his art dealer Georges Berges to reveal the identity of the buyers so the public can see if the buyers are trying to get access to the White House.
But there is yet more Hunter Biden news that the left-leaning legacy outlets has ignored. Only a few days after his father delivered a speech on the topic of racism at Tulsa, Hunter is hurling racial slurs in texts directed to his attorney, in the context of his attorney's $88K bill for work done regarding Hunter's joint venture with a large Chinese Oil Company. One can debate how newsworthy his foul language is, but if any of the Trump kids had written these texts, they would be all over the left-leaning media.
After the Post’s first article, both that newspaper and other news outlets have published numerous other emails and texts purportedly written to and from Hunter reflecting his efforts to induce his father to take actions as Vice President beneficial to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, on whose board of directors Hunter sat for a monthly payment of $50,000, as well as proposals for lucrative business deals in China that traded on his influence with his father.
My concern is, once again, that we have two media teams. They only report "news" that fits their narrative. The left-leaning legacy news never hesitated to maul the philistine and despicable Trump children, but it is hands-off when it comes to Hunter Biden, even though big amounts of suspicious money are connected with his exploits. And even though his moral character with regard to race relations conflicts sharply with the stated positions of his father, Joe Biden. On the other hand, the right wing media, such as the Daily Wire, is happy to heavily criticize Hunter Biden.
I'm convinced that many people don't actually want to be well informed. They choose their news sources so that they hear only those sorts of stories that make them feel like the world is the way they want it to be. This is true on the political left and the political right, and it doesn't seem like anything is going to change anytime soon. That said, can we at least start referring to the news media in a different way? Can we start referring to the two news teams as "news filters"? What news filter do you use? "I use the FOX news filter" or "I use the NPR/MSNBC/NYT/WaPo news filter. Doing this would make me feel 1% less bad about this rampant partisanship.
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